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Thursday, April 21, 2011

Julia Gillard leads the march for Anzac in the 51st state by John Pilger

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard leaves after speaking at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington, DC. Photograph: Getty Images.

As Washington releases another wave of terror on a faraway land, the Australian prime minister is reviving the spirit of Gallipoli and preparing her country to play its old role of deputy sheriff to Uncle Sam.

The street where I grew up in Sydney was a war street. There were long silences, then the smashing of glass and screams. Pete and I played Aussies-and-Japs.

Pete's father was an object of awe. He weighed barely seven stone and shook with malaria and was frequently demented. He would sit in a cane chair, drunk, scything the air with the sword of a Japanese soldier he said he had killed. There was a woman who flitted from room to room, always red-eyed and fearful, it seemed. She was like many mothers in the street. Wally, another mate, lived in a house that was always dark because the blackout blinds had not been taken down. His father had been "killed by the Japs". Once, when Wally's mother came home, she found he had got a gun, put it in his mouth and blown his head off. It was a war street.

The insidious, merciless, lifelong damage of war taught many of us to recognise the difference between the empty symbolism of war and the actual meaning. "Does it matter?" the poet Siegfried Sassoon mocked at the end of an earlier slaughter, in 1918, as he grieved his younger brother's death at Gallipoli. I grew up with that name, Gallipoli. The assault on the Turkish Dardanelles was one of the essential crimes of imperial war, causing the death and wounding of 392,000 on all sides. The Australian and New Zealanders' losses were among the highest, proportionally; and 25 April 1915 was declared not just a day of remembrance but the "birth of the Australian nation". This was based on the belief of Edwardian militarists that true men were made in war, an absurdity that is about to be celebrated yet again.

Eager to talk war

Anzac Day has been appropriated by those who manipulate the cult of state violence – militarism – in order to satisfy a psychopathic deference to foreign power and pursue its aims. And the "legend" has no room for the only war fought on Australian soil: that of the Aboriginal people against the European invaders. In a land of cenotaphs, not one stands for them.

The modern war-lovers have known no street of screams and despair. Their abuse of our memory of the fallen, and why they fell, is common among all servitors of rapacious power, but Australia is a special case. No country is more secure in its strategic remoteness and resources, yet no western elite are more eager to talk war and seek imperial "protection".

Australia's military budget is A$32bn (£21bn) a year, one of the highest in the world. Less than two months' worth of this war-bingeing would pay for the reconstruction of Queensland after the catastrophic floods, yet not a cent is forthcoming. In July, the same fragile flood plains will be invaded by a joint US-Australian military force, firing laser-guided missiles, dropping bombs and blasting the environment and marine life. This is rarely reported. Rupert Murdoch controls 70 per cent of the capital city press and his world-view is widely shared in the media.

In a 2009 US cable released by WikiLeaks, the then Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd, who is now foreign affairs minister, implores the Americans to "deploy force" against China if Beijing does not do as it is told. Another Labor leader, Kim Beazley, secretly offered Australian troops for an attack on China over Taiwan in 2006. In the 1960s, Prime Minister Robert Menzies lied that he had received a request from the Washington-created regime in Saigon for Australian troops.

Oblivious, Australians waved farewell to a largely conscripted army, almost 3,000 of whom were killed or wounded. The first Australian troops were run by the CIA in "black teams" – assassination squads. When the government in Canberra made a rare complaint to Wash­ington that the British knew more about America's war aims in Vietnam than they, the US national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, replied: "We have to inform the British to keep them on side. You in Australia are with us come what may." As an Australian soldier once said to me: "We are to the Yanks what the Gurkhas are to the British. We're mercenaries
in all but name."

They call me the sheriff

WikiLeaks recently disclosed the American role in Julia Gillard's Canberra "coup" against Prime Minister Rudd in 2010. Gillard, lauded in US cables as a "rising star", and her Labor Party plotters have turned out to be assets of the American embassy in Canberra. Once installed, she committed Australia to Washington's war in Afghanistan for the next ten years – twice as long as Britain.

Gillard likes to appear flanked by flags, but with her robotic delivery and stare, it is an unsettling tableau. On 6 April, she intoned, "We live in a free country – and in a largely free world – only because the Australian people answered the call when the time of decision came." She was referring to the despatch of Australian troops to avenge the death of a minor imperial figure, General Charles Gordon, during a popular uprising in Sudan in 1885. She omitted to say that a dozen horses of the Sydney tramway company also "answered the call" but expired during the long voyage.

Australia's role as "deputy sheriff" (promo­ted to "sheriff" by George W Bush) is to police great power designs now being challenged by most of the world. Leading Australian politicians and journalists report on the Middle East after having their flights covered and expenses paid by the Israeli government or its promoters. Two Green Party candidates who dared to criticise Israel's lawlessness and the silence of its local supporters are currently being set upon. A Murdoch retainer has accused them of advocating a "modern rendering of Kristallnacht". Both have since received multiple death threats. Put out more flags, boys.

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"A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction." Graham Greene

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Togs's Place.Com is a massive blog/web site. To get around and find articles you want or just explore, use the SEARCH BLOG, if you enter Noam Chomsky, you'll not only come up with numerous articles, speeches, interviews by and with Chomsky, but also being referred to in articles by Robert Fisk, John Pilger, Naomi Kline and myself. With Blogger you've got to scroll down from the most recent till the oldest. Every posting has a label ie, New Romans;Middle East from May 18 07 to today, this is a new system I've adopted for labels, previous labels on this topic were New Romans;Middle East 4, 3, 2, 1. These numbers go backwards to when I started this site in October 2006. New Romans;Middle East from May 18 07 to today will relabeled New Romans;Middle East from May 18 to June 10 07 for easy reference and the new label will be New Romans;Middle East from June 10 07 to today. The Recent Posts is the quick link to my Recent Postings. The Links can take you to 170 different web sites in Australia and around the World.

It's been a learning experience for me operating this blog but there is an insatiable hunger for alternative news and opinion on a range of issues in Australia that is often ignored or sidelined by the corporate media and an increasing self censored and Murdoch managed ABC.

Journalists and Writers I Like.

"Bread and work and love, the poor man’s trinity, and by all three needs they chain him down." Christina Stead 1902-1983 Seven Poor Men of Sydney

"Every government is run by liars and nothing should be believed." I.F.Stone 1907-89

"I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult." Arthur Miler 1915-2005

"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act." George Orwell 1903-50

"It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understandig the hidden agendas of the message that surrounds it." John Pilger

"Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war - for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more." Joesph Heller 1923-99

"Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism." Graham Greene 1904-91

"My experience in the First World War and now the Second World War [his son Barney was killed in the Battle of Singapore] changed my outlook on things. It is hard to believe that there is a God. I feel the Bible is a book written by man but for the purpose of preying on a person’s conscience, and to confuse him. Anyone who taken part in a bayonet charge (and I have) [Gallipoli], and has managed to retain his proper senses, must doubt the truth of the Bible and the powers of God, if one exists. And considering the many hundreds of different religions that there are in this world of ours, and the fact that many religions have caused terrible wars and hatreds throughout the world, and that many religions that have hoarded tremendous wealth and property while people inside and outside religion are starving , it is difficult to remain a believer. No Sir, there is no God, it is only a myth." Albert Facey 1894-1982 A Fortunate Life

"Now take my case. I’m twenty-nine and have two brothers—one in the Liberal Party and one serving six years for rape and arson. My sister Peg is on the streets and Dad lives off her earnings. Mum is pregnant by the boarder and because of this Dad won’t marry her. Last night I got engaged to an ex-prostitute and I wish to be fair to her: should I tell her about my brother in the Liberal Party." David Ireland 1927- The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

"Prime Minster Howard I’ve heard You met George Bush and the Pope too, I understand, Oh I liked the Pope much better, I only had to kiss his hand." L’Amour Denis Kevans 1939-2005

"The first law of journalism-to confirm existing prejudice rather than contradict it." Alexander Cockburn

"The Labour Party [ALP], starting with a band of inspired Socialists, degenerated into a vast machine for capturing political power, but did not know how to use the power when attained except for the profit of individuals[...] Such is the history of all Labour organisations in Australia, and not because they are Australian , but because they are Labour..." Victor Gordon Childe 1892-1957, How Labour Governs

"The trouble with a free market economy is that it requires so many policemen to make it work." Neal Ascherson, 1932- Games with the Shadows, Policing the Marketplace.

"The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism. It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. " Major General Smedley Butler,1881-1940

"What is the crime of robbing a bank compared with the crime of founding one." Bertolt Brecht 1898-1956

"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?" Kurt Vonnegut 1922-2007

[Battler]" a conscientious person working against many odds to make a living; one whose life is a constant struggle.’ Battlers maybe men or women; black or white. They rarely deal with racism (the negative side of our tradition) because they sympathise with anyone facing adversity or unfair criticism. The term ‘battler’ is a state of mind-a traditional attitude which goes back to the convict era, when the battler was on a flogging to nothing but fiddled around the rules and held his masters in contempt. The battlers are aware that they are being lied to by....politicians; and they suspect that Keating’s warning that Australia could become a banana republic is in fact, happening before their eyes." Frank Hardy 1917-1994. Retreat Australia Fair 1990

I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer. Brendan Behan 1923-64

“I do what I do, and write what I write, without calculating what is worth what and so on. Fortunately, I am not a banker or an accountant. I feel that there is a time when a political statement needs to be made and I make it.” Arundhati Roy